One day in 1982, Carla Lowe received a phone call from a teacher at her son’s high school. “Your son had a bong in his locker,” the teacher told her. "I had noooo idea. He said, 'Mom, it's not mine. It's John's, the superintendent's son,'" she said.

If Lowe had asked her son’s peers for their reaction, they might have chuckled. A generation of middle-class schoolboys thought of smoking grass as illegal and sketchy but also as kind of cool and funny. “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine,” Sean Penn’s legendary character, Jeff Spicoli, told the store clerk in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The line had more than a ring of truth—the movie was based on Cameron Crowe’s book about spending the 1978-79 school year undercover at a San Diego high school.

Lowe’s reaction to news that her son smoked dope was not only incredulity but also horror. As a K-12 substitute teacher in a school district outside Sacramento, California, she saw the effects of pot smoking in the classroom firsthand: Scraggly-haired students would sit in the back of class and laugh; although polite, they were oblivious to the lessons and their schoolwork. Didn’t these kids know they were at risk of falling behind in school or, worse, becoming dropouts? In an age in which your success in life was determined increasingly by the scores you received on a standardized test you took as a teenager, Lowe thought smoking pot was practically the worst decision a high-school kid could make.

Lowe wanted a better life for her kids. She was not one of these carefree, stay-at-home Sandy Duncan-type moms. She was sensitive to her status in life. She had gone to Berkeley in the '50s, before the California’s flagship university became a countercultural mecca. Her classmates tended to be the most diligent students from California rather than the brainiest students from the nation as a whole. Graduates were more likely to raise a large family; Lowe and her husband had five children of their own. This period at Berkeley was more local than national, democratic than meritocratic, and socially conservative than socially liberal. She loved it. "The '50s were a great time to grow up. We had a great education," she enthused.

Lowe's later commitment to the anti-drug movement was unusually deep; among various accomplishments, she founded a political nonprofit that helped defeat California's pro-legalization initiative in 2010. But talk with anti-pot leaders and you find that many have a horror story about their children experimenting with marijuana. For them, pot is nothing less than a mortal threat to the success of their kids in schools and to a berth in the middle class. Marcie Beckett, an activist and a mother of two teenage boys in San Diego, described the problem this way: "I've seen grades plummet; I've seen kids not go to college, not hold a job."

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In the late '70s and early '80s, middle-class moms' status anxieties about their kids' future in the meritocracy fueled a powerful social movement and campaign. First Lady Nancy Reagan became the public face of "Just Say No" after she made a trip to a New York ad agency in October 1983. She watched a demonstration of an anti-drug campaign from the Ad Council, the major charity of the advertising industry. Parents were told to "(g)et involved with drugs before your children do." And school children were told that drug use and academic success don't mix. As one print ad, with the title "School Daze," put it: "School is tough enough without having to try to learn through a mind softened by drugs. So get the education you deserve. And learn how to say no to drugs." According to The New York Times, Nancy Reagan approved: "Both of these themes are exactly right.”

Reagan is still alive at the ripe old age of 92. But her campaign against the Jeff Spicolis of the world is dead. And her “movement has evaporated,” as Ivy G. Cohen, the former president of the Just Say No Foundation, noted. Several large nonprofit groups—Families in Action and the foundation itself—either have been renamed or merged with other organizations. Other nonprofits, such as the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, disbanded.

Whatever you think of "Just Say No," its decline has warped the debate over the legalization of marijuana in this country. It has contributed to the fuzzy notion that generational replacement is and will be the driving force in American attitudes toward pot. "Millennials are at the forefront of the recent rise in public support for same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana," Pew Research concluded in a March report. Older Americans who oppose pot are dying off, the report added.

Last October, 58 percent of Americans told Gallup they supported the legalization of marijuana. The figure was a record high. Yet the number may be misleading. If the previous half century is any guide, generational replacement has acted as a tidal rather than an unstoppable force on American attitudes about pot.

In the '70s, as the Baby Boomers came of age, the pro-pot tide rolled in. Eleven states, including California and Colorado, decriminalized it. And public support for full legalization doubled from 14 percent 1969 to 28 percent in 1977, according to Gallup.

But the pro-pot tide rolled out in the '80s and '90s. Baby Boomers didn't stay young forever. They got married and had kids. For parents who wanted their teenage children to go to college and grasped that doing well on the SAT was essential, allowing their young charges to live a Spicoli-like existence seemed like the height of irresponsibility.

Into this vacuum stepped Nancy Reagan’s campaign. At its height in the mid-'90s, the Just Say No Foundation had more than 1 million members and affiliates in 12 countries, according to Cohen. There was a theme song and an annual rally in May. In 1996, fewer Americans (25 percent) told Gallup they supported the legalization of the drug than in 1977 (28 percent). As Michael Massing, the author of The Fix, an acclaimed 1998 book on the drug wars, concluded, "Based on the numbers, Nancy Reagan's crusade against marijuana certainly seemed to be paying off."

So if middle-class moms’ aspiration for their children’s future in the meritocracy is a real factor, why have many parents stopped protesting pot?

One likely answer is they have less incentive to protest: Fewer high-school kids smoke regularly. In 1978, nearly two in five high-school seniors (37.1 percent) said they had used marijuana in the previous 30 days, according to the University of Michigan’s annual Monitoring the Future survey. Last year, barely more than one in five (22.7) said they had. This figure has changed little since the mid-'90s.

If the last half century is a guide, generational replacement has acted as a tidal rather than an unstoppable force on attitudes about pot.

Another likely answer for the decline of the parents movement is the success of medical marijuana. Talk with anti-pot leaders, and to a person they say the advent of medical pot in the mid-'90s reoriented the debate. Sue Rusche, co-founder of National Families in Action, said the tide turned after “three billionaires stepped forward—George Soros, Peter Lewis, and John Sperling—and funded so-called medical marijuana.” Like Lowe and Cohen, Rusche suggested that medical marijuana changed the national conversation over weed from a behavioral issue involving teenagers to a quality-of-life one involving mostly adults.

The decline in teenagers' use from the 1970s and '80s has been mirrored in the movies. Take a list such as Yahoo's "Top 25 Stoner Films of All Time." The only two films that depicted high-school students pot use realistically either were set or filmed before the era of "Just Say No," not only Fast Times at Ridgemont High but also Dazed and Confused. Subsequent stoner films have portrayed characters after they graduate from high school, such as the two Harold and Kumar films.

Scholars agree. As Jonathan P. Caulkins, a former co-director of Rand’s Drug Policy Research Center, wrote in Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, “The big change in marijuana consumption over the last half dozen years does not pertain to youth. Rather, it is the very substantial increase in the number of adults who use marijuana daily or near daily.” The share of adults who use pot regularly has risen to 8 percent from 7 percent in 2006. Also, the share of adults who have tried pot has risen to 38 percent from 24 percent in 1977.

The increase in the share of adults who have used pot has also made Americans more accepting of the drug. As William Galston and E.J. Dionne Jr. pointed out in a Brookings study last May, “demographic change and widespread public experience using marijuana imply that opposition to legalization will never again return to the levels seen in the 1980s.”

Galston and Dionne’s point is fair. Middle-class moms’ status anxieties about pot might be allayed if states impose and enforce strict laws that make it difficult for teenagers to obtain pot. (In fact, campaigners in states that legalized marijuana in 2012 specifically targeted moms in their advertisements.) The record of Colorado, one of two states where the recreational use of small amounts of weed is legal, likely will be important. On March 17, Governor John Hickenlooper signed into law two bills to protect children from pot, requiring child-proof packaging for edible marijuana, empowering pot retailers to confiscate fake IDs, and mandating that adults who grow marijuana ensure it is enclosed and locked. But if Colorado and Washington, the other state where recreational pot is legal, cannot stop teens from getting their hands on good dope, expect more middle-class moms to rise up in protest.

Beckett, the anti-pot activist in San Diego, is a good example. She is a Baby Boomer who won’t say if she smoked pot while growing up. (“I would say back in the old days it was 2 percent THC. Today it’s 20 percent THC,” she said.) Her attitude to the prevalence of medical and recreational pot in her city quivers on the horizon of despair. But ask her about what it will take to shake up the status quo, and she sounds like Carla Lowe. "When more and more kids start using, that's unfortunately what it might take for their parents to wake up and see the harm that this is causing."

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Members of Colombia's younger generation say they “will not torture for tradition.”

MEDELLÍN, Colombia—On a scorching Saturday in February, hundreds of young men and women in Medellín stripped down to their swimsuit bottoms, slathered themselves in black and red paint, and sprawled out on the hot cement in Los Deseos Park in the north of the city. From my vantage point on the roof of a nearby building, the crowd of seminude protesters formed the shape of a bleeding bull—a vivid statement against the centuries-old culture of bullfighting in Colombia.

It wasn’t long ago that Colombia was among the world’s most important countries for bullfighting, due to the quality of its bulls and its large number of matadors. In his 1989 book Colombia: Tierra de Toros (“Colombia: Land of Bulls”), Alberto Lopera chronicled the maturation of the sport that Spanish conquistadors had introduced to South America in the 16th century, from its days as an unorganized brouhaha of bulls and booze in colonial plazas to a more traditional Spanish-style spectacle whose fans filled bullfighting rings across the country.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”